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Sep 29, 2014

We need a new Gartner Hype Cycle for social networks. For me to even hear about the existence of Ello, get an invite and then read articles about why it won't work, it already sold its users by taking venture etc. it took less than 48 hours. But the Ello-Mania during thelast few days shows one thing: There's a market for a Facebook/Twitter alternative. I don't know if the real name policy is the decisive thing here, like in the article linked below, but people seem to be ready to accept some new platform in their lives. Interesting to think about which concept could prevail.

... seem to get a very high engagement. Compared to people I have heard talking about Buzzfeed and Vice and all these others, I hear very little talk about native advertising and branded content. Imgur's integration is a good example, and according to AdWeek, their native ads work pretty well.

Sep 20, 2014

I had a lot of discussions about how creepy and how great GoogleNow is. It is already using a technology Google just patented to know what you're watching right now on TV. So search may give you different results for keywords when you're watching this or that show. That's context, and it will be the future: Services behaving in dependence to what I am doing, thinking, wanting.

The 49ers Levi's stadium is an interesting experiment - connectivity over mobile is traditionally bad where tens of thousands of people meet, and WiFi in a sports venue has vast opportunities. Then again, we don't really what people will actually use it for. So observing the 49ers effort may hold some great learnings for others who will offer Internet in a stadium. Here's a story about the guy who built it:

User experience, in my opinion, is a lot more important than "design" in terms of beauty. There are several sites that look ugly but get their job done properly, and these are a lot more successful than beautiful sites that are just 99% user friendly and not 100%. You cannot overestimate the importance of UX. No wonder there is software that helps app makers to create the best experience possible, and one of those is InVision, portrayed here in Wired:

Says a study. The research from AOL platforms tracked data from 500 million clicks and the stats refer to pais advertising on social media. So it tries to compare YouTube preroll with a Facebook ad or sponsored Tweet. Anyhow, it seems that YouTube advertising can work very well.

Apple Pay may become big in the US pretty quickly. Business Insider gives us a (short) slide deck with some background on mobile payment. And I still wonder why I don't have a mobile Amazon checkout in any store (who I trust with my payments a lot more than Apple) and where PayPal wants to be in a few years.

and he's making a living on that social network now. Besides YouTube, social networks are becoming distribution platforms for video content, enabling people (and one day, when they get it, incumbent publishers) to earn real money.

Some interesting statistics in this research by Localytics about how often we open apps (in a month) from certain categories and how long the session duration is. Music has the highest increase in sessions length as more and more people use music streaming apps, and social networking is still increasing in number of sessions and session durations. And I think the time spent in apps vs. mobile browser - my last number was 84% apps vs 16% browser - will continue to grow for apps.

Snapchat hired the former "Director of Digital" from Nike. Apparently to win "Sports partnerships". I think we underestimate messengers as second screens or "one to many communication tools" because communication on them is not visible to the public and concentrated on small "one to one" or "one to some" groups. But the hundreds of millions of people using messengers might enjoy that realtime and non-public component a lot, especially in sports. You Facebook post "goal! yes!" looks awkward like 2 minutes later, but it stays on your profile or on your Twitter timeline forever. In messengers, that's different, which makes them a great second screen tool. Not only for sports.

Sep 9, 2014

This is a highly interesting field. If machines can identify any object on an image without humans being involved, the opportunities - good and bad - are endless. And who came out first in a yearly challenge for image recognition? Team Google.

Nice piece by the Business Insider - an in depth look an Amazon's situation and strategy. I do not subscribe to the skepticism in this article at all. If you make more online sales than the next dozen competitors combined, your position should be good enough. Plus, there's one key sentence hidden in this text: Amazon could make money. It just chooses not to. Because the "war" is not over, it has just begun. If I had a pile of cash on the bank, I would buy their stock. And except for Alibaba, I don't see competitors who could really threaten their e-commerce position.

Facebook's obvious attack on video can be scary for many publishers. These statistics do not make it better:
From May 2014 to July 2014 video views on Facebook exceeded 50% growth. In 3 months. 65% of video views are mobile. More than 1 billion video views per day. Faceboko does not reveal when a video is counted as "viewed", and the autoplay feature may start more videos than users actually want to see. Plus video has been ranked better in the news feed algorithm. But if they figure out (and they will) how to market pre rolls, this will disrupt a few markets.

Sep 8, 2014

Video Publishers, brace yourselves: Facebook is coming. For a market like Germany, it is hard to estimate the real numbers, but it does not seem far-fetched to assume that Facebook could double the existing video inventory within 12-24 months. Which would mean that everybody and their mother would get into video advertising - and marketers would shift budgets from print and especially TV into Facebook - or that CPM for pre roll has reached its peak during the last 2 years and will come under severe pressure since there's so much more inventory that can be targeted to any audience.

We will see more and more of these headlines. While actual transactions completed on smartphones and tablets are just a bit more than one third, the visits on online shopping sites on mobile have reached 52%. Still do not offer a responsive site? Or better yet, only offer a responsive site? Think mobile first.

Sep 4, 2014

The unbelievable wearable growth, Android Wear and the upcoming launch of an Apple smartwatch will have an impact on a few markets. First of all, just like with cards in my wallet, I do not have unlimited space on my arms. I won't wear three devices left and right and clip a steptracker to my underwear. It will be an all-in-one game, probably. On the one hand, we use to wear fashion accessories on our wrists. On the other hand: status symbols. Watches that cost as much as the car the guy next to you is driving.
Both may come under pressure. Fashion meets tech, but more importantly, luxury gets a new definition. No matter how rich you are, you won't be able to have a better phone than I do. Yours may be in a massive gold shell, but it will weigh more and your Minecraft, YouTube or Facebook will be exacvtly as good as mine. If this happens to watches, the likes of Rolex, Hublot and all those others may sense severe pressure. Personally I believe that the very expensive watches, more used as a financial investment than a timekeeper, may survive this. You don't have to wear your Patek Philippe everyday to value it. and you're simply holding on to it until the next generation takes over (wonderful campaign). But the "up to 5,000USD" range may get into difficulties. Or, as Jony Ive puts it: The iWatch may sink Swintzerland.

Both, of course. And everyone else. But there are some strange numbers circulating. While my impression is that particularly teens and millenials value YouTube higher than TV and anything else - note that 3 of the worldwide top 5 channels deal with gaming, that teens have a YouTube-biased view of celebrities etc., Nielsen statistics say that YT reaches more 18-34 than any cable network - other studies show a different "main audience". A research published by YouTube itself for Germany, where 1500 people were asked, is headlined that the common German YouTube user would be over 30, has a high average income, is digital savvy and likely to go out and spend money on restaurants and gadgets. Sounds strange to me. Very much like a "don't spend money in print or TV, buy YouTube ads"-cry to advertisers as they have teens and millenials in their pockets anyway.

I love innovation products from the past, especially those that failed, not only for their entertainment value but also for the fact that they remind us to look twice when the next uber-cool new piece of connected something hits the kickstarter market. And in 30 years, people will look at some of today's products how we look at these: check out 30 great commercials on TIME.

Sep 2, 2014

Facebook's ad targeting is insane anyways. You can talk to managers about how important Facebook is, how they have 1.3 billion monthly active users, how 250,000 photos are uploaded there and the like button is being used a gajillion times per minute. All this is so far beyond our ability to understand, you could make other numbers up and they would have the exact same effect, as long as they are huge. If you want to impress someone who is not super-familiar with Facebook: Sit together with them and simply book an ad together. Show them the targeting options and they will understand the platform immediately. And as if targeting would not be good enough yet, they keep adding useful stuff: Now the network connection. Linking to an HD video or your 138 MB app download? Don't advertise to people who are on 3G. Simply great.

I don't know Reddit's exact traffic figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of their traffic came from Europe. The headline means the business world. I around 1 million social media and business discussions I have had in the last years Reddit maybe came up twice. Especially "Ask me anything", known as AMA, is a great format that should have been copied and applied to their own sites by many publishers already. But since they won't see the difference between a chat and AMA, which requires basic knowledge of marketing, positioning, branding and community management, let Reddit make it bigger and bigger, and rightfully get what they deserve. Now with a dedicated app:

I am not so sure about this. Vice is on top of all that "new new media" hype stories, but will they ever even make 2.5bn turnover one day - not to say reach a "real" company value of that size? Maybe I am not smart enough, maybe I can't see the strategic angle of Disney investing in them that will allow saving revenues and profit at other ends of their business, or it's just one of those hypes. Now Fox owns 5% (purchased at a 1.4bn valuation last year), Disney and Hearst (owners of A&E who actually bought the stake) now have 10%. For 250 million. Maybe that's a business model: Sell 10-15 pieces of a few per cent of your company at crazy valuations. Let them deal with the fallout.

If you think about how data production and collection evolved over the last few years, it is funny and sad how little you read about the evolvement of CRM - which is based on data collection, analysis and data-driven action. Here's an interesting read from Peter Perera, named "we need an internet of not-only customers", laying out the concept of poly-identity (which i can strongly support) and its connection to graph databases / big data. Great read!

Interesting report from acquitygroup about the adoption of "the internet of things" from a consumer perspective. Not that you wouldn't think of these things by yourself: huge market opportunities, ease of use decisive for consumer success, providing real vale etc. But it's nice to see that backed up with numbers and statistics. Access to PDF/whitepaper:

Great TNW article about China's mobile ecosystem - the biggest smartphone market in the world. iPhone users have an experience pretty close to ours, but on Android - without an official Google Play market, there are six local app markets that are dominating the distribution of apps, WeChat, TenCent and others being heavily involved. Very interesting read.

Unbelievable numbers again from YouTube. Their top 100 videos made 9.6bn (!!) video views in July 14. That's 80% growth YoY. The most popular channel? A Swedish gamer, running a channel named PewDiePie. Second? DisneyCollector with toy unboxing videos.

Then comes Shakira, then two more gaming channels. No Viacom, no Disney, no ESPN, no huge network.

Everyone is expecting the iWatch - and it may very well come. But maybe the time has come for a disruption in mobile payments. Interesting overview with insights in studies and research with regards to market maturity suggests it's about time:

15 years ago, I would have bet that Swatch would lead this category (anyone remembers Swatch .Beat?). Well, 15 years ago everything in the digital world was very different. But still, I cannot see a better fit for any watchmaker with regards to brand and positioning and the wearables trend than with Swatch. Keen to see what they will come up with - fitness tracker of course, but what else? - and how the market will look next year.